


Time Enough

by Kitsprite



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, Immortality, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-23 20:52:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13198353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kitsprite/pseuds/Kitsprite
Summary: You are older than any human should be, but you look like a young man. Your name is Dirk, the Strider, and you are immortal.





	Time Enough

You are, as far as you know, the eldest. You were born in a land now long sunk. Doggerland, they would later name it. To you, it was simply home. For thirty years, you hunted and fished, you married and you had lovers. You had children. And then you were gored by a boar. Your wife, your children, you brothers and sisters and kinsfolk, your whole tribe prayed to the spirits and gods of the land to save you, or at least make your death painless. Apparently, it worked. You did not die, even as you bled out all your blood. Your tribe brought you food, confused but grateful that their best warrior had not died. You healed, and there was no scar. Your people called you Drk, blessed.  


Years passed, and you became an elder, then the chief, and your tribe and the others nearby marvelled at how you still appeared to be a young man. You watched as your children began to wrinkle, their hair go grey, their bodies weaken, while your skin stayed smooth and your hair red and your body lean and strong. First your wife, then your siblings, then your children died. Your grandchildren grew old and died, and you could not stand to watch any more. So you stole away in the dead of night with your spear and flint knife and the clothes on your back. In the morning, you started walking towards the sunrise, and you never looked back.  


You avoided people as much as you could, but even you needed company. You met hunting parties sometimes, and sometimes you liked a hunter. You’d stay with that tribe for a season or two, sometimes you’d take the hunter to bed, if he liked men that way. But you were always sure to move on before you had to see him age. The centuries passed, and new things started to appear in the trade networks coming from the south. So you followed them. In the dry, warm south you met tanned, black haired people who built houses from baked mud and cared for fields of seed-bearing grass. They got enough food from this that they could have people spend all their time on things other than getting food.  


Those villages grew and became more complex, the little shrines became bigger, temples, and wisemen and wisewomen became priests and priestesses. These villages drew smaller settlements into their orbit, and grew bigger still, and for the first time you could be surrounded by people and completely anonymous. You loved it, and you hated it. These cities brought forth new technologies. Metalwork particularly impressed you, and you learned it for yourself. It was then that you met the first of the Horned Gods. He was tall and broad and damp, with long limp black hair and dark blue eyes. His skin was grey like stone, and he had bright red-orange-yellow horns like arrows growing from his head. His name was Rrkyss Tz’hkk, or Equius Zahhak as you called him, and he was the lord of metal and bow. He taught you the secrets of bronze and iron, although he disdained you your humanity. He mentioned that there were eleven others like himself. Not long after he left, to wherever gods go.  


The centuries passed and kingdoms rose and fell, then empires, and then, not too long after a man called Kurush from the land of Anshan conquered the city of Bab-ilon, you met another like you. Her name was Roxanna, from the Baktri tribe and she was the most beautiful woman in the world to you. She had white hair and pink eyes, and skin so pale it burned in any sun but never darkened. You knew her affliction, one of your brothers had been the same, all that time ago. Your tribe had called your brother Beloved Walker, and made him their shaman. Roxy’s people covered her in veils and cloaks and did not speak of her difference.  


You stayed together, though you claimed to be brother and sister rather than man and wife, because you could not stand to watch another child of yours die, and besides, you had long since concluded that you preferred men. Roxy was more able to deal with it, and married men and had many children over the next few centuries. You and she always disappeared before anyone could notice that you didn’t age. Centuries passed, and Kurush’s empire fell. A new one rose in the west, around the great sea, and it was there that you met the next like you. Her name was Yohanna, and she was a slave taken from a land called Yuda to the great city of Roma. Roxy, pretending to be a Roman lady, bought her at auction because she could cook, and neither you nor Roxy had ever been more than passing at that. When you packed up your household and headed to Egypt, you brought her with you. It was in Alexandria that you noticed Yohanna looked younger than her own children. You freed her and her husband, and their children, and asked Yohanna to follow you when you set sail for India.  


In Barbarikon, by the Indus, you met the fourth. He called himself Jek, and said he was from the lands of the Kushans in the mountains to the north-east. He claimed to be four hundred years old, and spoke of the great king Kanishka as if he had known him. The people in Barbarikon thought him just a storyteller, and you learned that that was how he had been making a living for over a hundred years. You and he became lovers. He had never known another like himself, and you were drawn to his childlike energy. But it was not to last, and after a few decades you went your separate ways. Yohanna chose to go with Jek, and you arranged for the four of you to meet in Ctestiphon in thirty years time. Then, you and Roxy parted ways for the first time in over six centuries. You went east, to the spice islands and then north to the empire of the Han, she went west and south, to the kingdoms of Arabia Felix and Aksum. The four of you would continue this pattern of meeting up for a decade or two, and then dispersing for thirty or forty years, for the next few centuries. As the Renaissance swept Europe, and then the Enlightenment followed you had given up on meeting any other immortals. You did, however, meet the other Horned Lords, but only ever in passing.  


In 1760, while you were living in Edinburgh and experimenting with chemicals, you received a letter from Roxy, who had been in Montréal in the former New France. She wrote about a boy who had had his throat slashed by his father, bled out, but yet survived. Further, he had a twin, who had killed their father and been hanged, but had not died. You took ship for Québec immediately. There you met Roseanne and Davide Lalonde, children of a prostitute and a fur trapper. They looked almost identical, both white haired and elfin, but for their eyes. Roseanne had violet eyes, and Davide bright crimson red. Albino, physicians called them now, and gave them darkened glasses to protect their eyes. Roxy hade taken them to the colony’s largest city and posed as their mother. They were so young, still children really, and so you stayed and the wealthy Dutch merchant ‘Diederick Strider’ married the widow ‘Roxanne Lalonde’. You were happy there for almost a decade before you had to move on. It pained them to do so, but the twins agreed that they had to separate for a few years. Albino twins were too memorable. You and Davide went to México, where you introduced him to Jek, now going by Jacob English, while Roseanne, now calling herself Rose, and Roxy went to New York City posing as sisters to meet Yohanna, now calling herself Jane Crocker.  


Jake had met another on his travels, a girl on a small island in the Pacific. She had been born of a European sailor and a Tahitian woman, and had stowed away aboard Jake’s ship as it sailed to México hoping to find her father in the land the ships came from. Jake found her and struck up a friendship. The crew assumed they were sleeping together and a jealous sailor stabbed her in the heart. She failed to die and it took all of Jake’s experience dealing with baying mobs to stop them throwing her overboard. She introduced herself as Jade, a translation of her name, and the two of you bonded over modern science.  


In New Orleans, in 1804, Dave and Rose met their first Horned Lords, Krrk’tt Vrrntss, going by Karkat, and K’nrryrr Mrrym, going by Kanaya. You had thought them lovers, so inseparable and affectionate, she was the only one he did not shout at, but apparently you were only half right. You did not fully understand what Dave told you in his letters, rambling and confused with metaphor as they were, but apparently the Horned Lords had more than one kind of love, and while Karkat and Kanaya were together in one, it was more like the love between yourself and Roxy. This left them free to pursue a more carnal love with others. Dave would take up with Karkat, and Rose with Kanaya, and despite your misgivings their relationships would last.  


Dave met the final immortal in 1889. He had been living in Amsterdam, enjoying the overcast skies and freewheeling city. He struck up a friendship with a young piano player called Johannes Egbert. Herr Egbert and he were inseparable, though he and Karkat did clash initially, and so it was natural that Dave would notice that his friend did not grow old as the 19th century ticked over into the 20th. They both moved to London, to escape notice, in 1901, and then to Ville-de-Québec in 1912, though Dave would never admit that it was because he was homesick.  


The twentieth century was a tense time for the eight of you. You spent most of the early 1900s in South America, avoiding the wars in Europe and Asia. When the Cold War began and the prospect of nuclear war loomed, all eight of you agreed to live in more rural areas, away from targets. After all, none of you had ever been caught in a nuclear explosion, and for all you knew it might actually kill you. Even the Horned Lords were concerned by this. The concept of adolescence was an irritating innovation as well. None of you looked older than sixteen or seventeen, and for the first time in eons people started treating you as a child. Telephones, and near the end of the century the internet, were far more welcome. Never before had it been so easy to stay in touch, even scattered across the globe. On the other hand, film and television, particularly news, made it ever more likely that one of you would get caught.  


It was just seventeen years into the new century that you had an idea. The only way not to get caught, was to come out into the open. It was with this in mind that you gathered all eight of you together for the first time since 1920.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this at like one in the morning. I don't really have any kind of plans for it, but if it sparks anything for anyone else then feel free to use it. Just post a comment or shoot me a message or something so I can read it.


End file.
